The latest 2010 car insurance ratings are now posted online from JD Powers. Previously, we posted the Car Insurance Ratings for 2008, here: 2008 Car Insurance Ratings. Not a whole lot of details are given on the JD Powers website about how they come up with these particular car insurance ratings. The results this year are very similar to their insurance ratings from 2008 and 2009. Every year, JD Powers rate the best automobile insurers on 5 different criteria:

Overall Satisfaction

Contacting the Insurer

Policy Offerings

Billing and Payment

Pricing

Using this same data, Product Review Ratings breaks these ratings down into a Top-10 Car Insurers
List: The difference in these Top-10 insurance, is that the overall satisfaction score is averaged in along with the other five criteria to derive an Overall Rating score on a 100 point scale. Using this embellished set of criteria, the outcome changes ever so slightly over the original JD Powers Ratings and should provide a clearer picture of which car insurance companies rate best, overall. Product Review Ratings Auto Insurance Ratings criteria are as follows:

Experience: (Customer’s Overall Satisfaction)

Options: (Car Insurers Policy Offerings)

Pricing: (Car Insurance Policy Price)

Billing: (Satisfaction with billing methods and issues)

Contact: (Contacting the Insurer)

Overall: (Overall Rating based on above scores, 1-100)

Ratings 2011

This Top-10 list should be used as a guide only – a rough place to get started. Look at the top-10 insurers by JD Powers and compare for yourself. The insurance ratings are not all created equal. Unfortunately, JD Powers does not offer a detailed report on how they came up with the insurance ratings in each of these categories. One huge factor that is not taken into account, here, is how combining auto insurance with a homeowners insurance policy can drastically reduce your Auto Insurance cost or vice versa. Some of the cheapest-looking car insurance companies aren’t as cheap as they seem when you factor in a home owners discount. For those of us who own homes, it doesn't pay to switch to a cheaper auto insurance company if the cost of a home owners policy negates those savings. For the 2nd time in the three year period that I’ve reviewed these car insurance ratings, Amica has come up on top. I was unable to go back and see if the 2009 JD Powers auto Insurance Ratings reported the same. With Amica receiving perfect scores in every category every year, including cost, I would expect to know a few very satisfied Amica Car Insurance Policy owners. This was not the case. Since writing the 2008 article on auto insurance ratings, I’ve recommended Amica a few times to family and friends. Surprisingly, I have yet to find one person who switched after giving Amica a call? Why? Because, Amica was not as cheap as their current auto insurance policy. For a company who ranks best on price year after year, this is kind of surprising isn’t it? In fact, Amica is the only auto insurance company JD Powers ranks a perfect 5 of 5 stars for price. I can only think of a few things that could cause this discrepancy. Obviously, a great deal of other variables come into play: Credit Rating, geographic area, Home-Owners, demographics, driving record and even the type of cars being insured could reflect a different outcome for some people shopping the same insurance company. The lesson here is that what works for some may not be what is best for everyone. Still, if you’re looking for place to get started, these Top-10 car insurers will serve as a great short-list of places to call first.

One of the problems in J.D. Powers rating system on insurance companies is that they do not break out *claims* or *rental*. The biggest headache with a company in the *poor* bracket is that they have extremely an extremely poor claims department whose sole job seems to be to slash the estimate and try to rush the claim in order to charge your deduction. With one of companies, there is also question of the professionalism of the claims people and their relationship with the *preferred* body shops. This company claims adjuster bragged about his 20 year relationship (personal) with the company’s preferred shop.
Because of this omission, The brunt of the displeasure is directed at the agent. In fact, this company’s agent are their best asset but are under cut by other departments that they have no control over. For this reason, one must take JD powers ratings with a grain of salt and I was shocked to see the survey made no mention of the most important part of auto insurance: Claims. not one question related to claims or the rental department